Consumer insights in a world of limited audience data

Rating: 10 out of 10

April 28, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our agency uses Helixa as just one tool in a large social intelligence tool kit to provide insights into consumer behavior that can support a larger social media audit and construction of a social strategy. Because social audience tools give you limited demographic, psychographic and consumption insights, Helixa is an amazing tool to get to understand both a current social audience and a potential customer base for a brand. Some of the most crucial questions Helixa answers is about interest affinity when planning a social and content strategy, improving cultural relevance and staying ahead of our competitors. I can send our content and social teams out with informed insights about content pillars, potential brand partners, and social behaviors to inform content calendars, future collabs and to understand their KPIs through the lens of their audience. I personally love Helixa’s interface. It’s visually pleasing and really easy to use data points for presentations. Because it pulls so much data, the loading times for Helixa can sometimes be maddening. In depth queries, especially if pulling for a large audience size, take minutes sometimes to load. Plus, if the loading takes to long or if you navigate away from the page for too long, the search times out and you have to start again. A small price to pay for much needed intelligence.

Pros

Visualization
Category organization
Valuable intelligence

Cons

Loading times
Navigation
Easier Social Audience Uploads

Likelihood to Recommend

Users have to be upfront with clients on where Helixa is pulling data from or they could get the wrong idea about the insights. Helixa pulls from a number of sources to gain insight but may not specifically be from the owned channel social audience. By using total social view, you can potentially get the audience data for your Twitter channel which can add specificity to your insights but they can differ from the overall consumer audience. Helixa is best used as a starting point, a place to get ideas and pull supporting data to understand patterns in behavior about an audience. I would not necessarily take its word as gospel, just one piece of a larger insight. My favorite section are the opinions as they show what is most important to the specific audience and can really help get the wheels turning. My least favorite section are the influencer categories. From my experience with Helixa, the influencers tend to skew political and mainstream which is not necessarily what clients are looking for when trying to understand what kind of people are influencing audiences. I also mind that Helixa pulls in a lot of unnecessary social apps like Flickr or Foursquare which are hardly used anymore.

Daisy Kelly

Associate Director, Social Strategy in Social Media at MediaCom (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review